Filmmaker Ken Burns focuses on American vision in KSU speech

Renowned documentary filmmaker and historian Ken Burns described his vision of the American experience Tuesday night at Kent State University, while reflecting on his trilogy of films chronicling the Civil War, baseball and jazz.

Nearly 3,000 people filled the Memorial Athletic and Convocation Center for the speech, the spring installment of Kent State's Presidential Speaker Series and keynote event for the Symposium on Democracy. The four-day series of events focuses on democratic values to commemorate the events of May 4, 1970.

Burns stressed the significance of America's past and how it can reveal what lies ahead in the future.

"Too often, as a culture, we have ignored this joyful historical noise, becoming, in the process, blissfully ignorant to the power those past lives and its stories and elements and moments have over this moment, and indeed our vast, unknown future and the opportunities and challenges that future presents for our democratic society," he said.

Quoting essayist Gerald Early, Burns said American civilization will be known for three things when studied 2,000 years from now: The Constitution, baseball and jazz. "'They're the three most beautiful things Americans have created,' (Early) said."

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Baseball reflects the story of America: thousands of games won and lost, heroic and not-so-heroic careers rising and falling, Burns said, adding that it offers a prism through which American events are reflected, such as the struggle for racial equality, which Jackie Robinson helped to further on the diamond of our national pastime.

The Civil War is the closest our country came to suicide, Burns said, adding that generations later the war and Abraham Lincoln are still recalled when America seeks to redefine itself.

"We have counted on Abraham Lincoln for nearly a century and a half when the tide and overflow of human events has threatened to capsize us," he said. "We return to him for a sense of unity, conscious and national purpose and still he and the Civil War have much to teach us."

Jazz also proves a window into American society's racial struggles, he said.

"The only art form created by Americans that is recognized around the world, an enduring and double expression of our genius and our promise," he said. "Jazz insists and offers perhaps the explosive hypothesis that those who have had the peculiar experience of being unfree in a free land can actually be at the center of our history."

His movies, he said, while focused on different subjects, have each revolved around one question: "Who are we?"

"Each film offers an opportunity to pursue this question, and though never answering it fully, of course, nevertheless deepens the question with each succeeding project," he said. "American history is a loud, raucous, moving, exquisite collection of noises that in the aggregate often combine to make the sweetest kind of music I know, and I've tried to listen to this music as much as I can in putting together the films we have made."

Each of the three subjects, Burns said, show that Americans can create and recreate something from nothing.

"What each of the three subjects daily reminded us was that the genius of America is improvisation," he said. "Our unique experiment, a profound intersection of freedom and creativity in nearly every gesture."